Battstat Applet

The Battstat Applet, shown in Figure
1, shows the status of the power subsystem in your
laptop. To add this applet to your Panel, right click on the
Panel and select Panel->Add to
panel->Applet->Monitors->Battery Status Utility.

Usage

Battstat applet requires no user input. You can, if you so
desire, configure it to some degree as described below.

Yellow: sets the battery level where the progress
bar will switch from green to yellow. Default: 40.

Orange: sets the battery level where the progress
bar will switch from yellow to orange. Default: 25.

Red: sets the battery level where
the progress bar will switch from orange to red. Default: 15.

The preview frame contains the battery progress bar and a
draggable slider. By dragging the slider you can preview how
it will look when the battery level actually changes. It
doesn't affect the battery in any way.

Notify me when battery charge is low: By selecting
this, a warning dialog will appear when the power falls
below the value in the Red
entry box.

Notify me when battery is fully re-charged: By
selecting this, a dialog window will appear when the battery
is fully re-charged.

Beep when either of the above is tru: If you select
this, your laptop will make an audible beep when any of the
two above happens.

Percentage text: If you click on this button, a font
selection dialog window will appear. You can then select the
font of your choice for the percentage text.

Suspend command: Whatever you enter here will be
executed when you click on the Suspend laptop in the
applet menu. If you clear this
entry field, the Suspend laptop entry will be
unselectable. For example, if you are using FreeBSD you
could enter apm -z or zzz here. Before you
enter anything though, first make sure that you can safely
suspend your laptop by testing the command in a shell.

Sound

So, you want to make the applet a bit more noisy? Just open the
GNOME Control Center and make sure that you have enabled sound
support for GNOME. Then you just have to assign your desired
sounds for the supported events in the Events tab. Check figure
13 below for an example of how my configuration looks like.